[spellbanisher]

Well, I wouldn't call the post sobering. Maybe solipsistic, but definitely not sobering.

Before I begin, I would like to wholeheartedly thank all those people, and you are in a fantastic moral majority, thankfully, who have paid for my book. Whether you loved it or hated it or fed it to the dog, thank you.

So he has no qualms about taking people's money even if they hated what he wrote. Most successful businesses subscribe the policy of "customer satisfaction guaranteed." Not this guy though. He's too good for that.

What’s up with Western civilisation right now? A burning sense of entitlement.

Hey, makes sense, if you are ignorant about the rest of the world, history, and of western civilization. How am I supposed to take this guy seriously when he says such braindead things? Does he know that the highest rates of piracy are in developing countries? Does he know that there has always been a very large black market for copyrighted and patented goods? Now, this market was not that big in the first few decades after World War II as publishers could produce and distribute goods at a lower price than pirates could, but piracy is nothing new, and it certainly doesn't represent any new dangerous and toxic development in western civilization.

Also consider that countries that don't have a system of “rights and entitlements” have extensive histories of piracy.

From “Bad Samaritans”

Today, Korea is one of the most inventive nations in the world--it ranks among the top five nations in terms of the number of patents granted annually by the US Patent Office. But until the mid-1980s it lived on reverse engineering. My friends would buy 'copy' computers that were made by small workshops, which would take apart IBM machines, copy the parts, and put them together. It was the same with trademarks. At the time, the country was one of the 'pirate capitals' of the world, churning out fake Nike shoes and Louis Vuitton bags in huge quantities...at the time imported music (LP records) or films (videos) were so expensive that few people could afford the real thing. We grew up listening to pirate rock'n' roll records...As for foreign books, they were still beyond the means of most students...most of my books in English were pirated. I could never have entered and survived Cambridge without those illegal books.

Sure, Chang, bootlegged books helped you get into Cambridge, but at what cost? How many children starved because of your sense of entitlement?

From “The Culture of Piracy in the Philippines”

The piracy market for DVDs, software and
music is a boon to a number of very different groups of people. One group
consists of the producers, traders and distributors of bootlegged media that
earn a reasonable income, important in a Third World country like the
Philippines. One estimate is that more than 100,000 people in the Philippines
earn a living by being part of the supply chain for pirated media (Joel
2006).page number?

...
Many film buffs are happy to get their films from illicit sources, because it
gives them an unprecedented access to inaccessible movies. Many of the
films that one can find in the pirate markets were never officially released
via the legitimate distribution channels in the Philippines, which
predominantly carry mainstream movie fare. For a very long time, being a
film fan in the Philippines meant either having to limit oneself to the
American and Filipino offerings in the cinemas and on video, or having to
pay a fortune for mail-ordered videos from abroad...

To take an example: Orson Welles´ classic Citizen Kane was never legally
available in the Philippines, and people had to go to great lengths to see the
movie. . Now it is easy to find in pirate markets. While the majority of films
for sale on the pirate markets are the same predictable Hollywood-
blockbusters as to be found in regular stores, it is possible to find
"independent" films, classic movies going back to the silent area, cult films,
and even occasionally experimental and documentary films (Cang et al
2002).

Examples of rare films that people have discovered on the pirate
market are a complete retrospective of the works of German art house
director Rainer Werner Fassbinder on three DVDs, a number of Chinese
silent movies from the late 1920s and early 1930s, and one of the
Crewmaster films by American video artist Matthew Barney, that was never
officially released on DVD.

Moving on...

But benefits and rights have gone* too far, it’s doing stuff it never was intended to do, like trapping people, like giving people an excuse not to get off their lazy arses, like bankrupting the continent.

The more this rant goes on, the more you realize how egotistical, egocentric, and out-of-touch this guy this. So now the sovereign debt crisis is a result of Europeans collectively becoming too lazy? Is that why the countries in the EU with the longest average working hours and weakest social safety nets were hit the hardest by the crisis?

Now you don't really have to think hard about this to see how egotistical and egocentric this guy is. He's basically trying to draw a straight line between people pirating his goods and the economic crisis. Pseudo-moralism at its worst. Vanity is at play here too. Let's follow his line of thought.

-guy haley thinks he's a great writer
-but guy haley isn't making as much money as he thinks he should be making.
-There is a lot of piracy going on. Indeed, some of those dastardly pirates have even uploaded some of his works!
-guy haley realizes that the reason he isn't sipping champagne and eating caviar is because people are stealing his stuff.
-guy haley has a revelation; the same reason he isn't doing well is the same reason society in general is doing worse—people have collectively lost their sense of morals and virtue. Western Civilization in decline. People have become immoral, selfish, spoiled, and lazy. Rising rates of poverty, declining standards of living, mass unemployment— is just people getting what they deserve.

Somebody should tell this guy that the revenues of the entertainment industry are growing much faster than the rest of the economy, and that the entertainment industry is one of the most profitable industries. But imagine how much money they'd have without piracy—they'd be able to buy China!

In the “middle class” (whatever the hell that is these days), we get do much hand-wringing, without thought as to how we can pay for all the good, honest, well-meaning services and so forth we wish to provide our fellow men so we can get on with our privileged life-styles guilt free. An argument you’ll hear in the right-wing press, but it goes much further than that. We might complain about our slipping standards of living, but compared to some poor dude working on a dump in Lagos stripping wire from junk, and the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of others like him the world over, we’re frankly still having a ball. ...Somehow, I can’t see all we hand wringing pseudo-liberals (I am one too, from time to time) wanting to give up our multi-room houses, cars and regular meals so we can all equally enjoy the bounty of Mother Earth any more than bankers want to give up their obscene bonuses.

This guy is truly clueless. The 'hand-wringing' is over bankers getting massive bonuses and making mad money despite destroying the welfare of millions of people.

Additionally, comparisons to poorer countries are irrelevant. The virtue of our economic system is that it is supposed to compensate people for the value they provide. Indeed, when people celebrate our economic system, whether you call that capitalism or free market economies or whatever, they argue that it creates wealth and prosperity by aligning value-added with compensation, or incentives.

If that's your system, that's your system, and you justify things within the context of that system. You can't on the one hand celebrate a system for aligning value-added and compensation, while also dismissing criticisms of declining standards of living because people are better off than those in third world countries. It is wrong that people who have massively destroyed social welfare are making the most money. It is wrong for productivity to go up year after year even as wages and benefits remain stagnant for the vast majority of people.

Notice the double-standard in his argument. He's basically saying that people should not get all uppity about economic injustice because compared to poor people in the third world, we're all doing okay. But then he whines that he is not getting compensated for the value he thinks he is providing for society, even though he is much better off than a poor person in the third world.

On one forum, I found a lady thanking the person who had provided the copy to copy, saying “the epubs I use are usually my own, but…” What?! Fuck you, that’s not your book, that’s my book. It’s not yours to give away. You didn’t write it.

By this logic, I can't give away my car because I didn't build it. By that logic, no one owns anything except what they created with their own hands.

You are literally taking food out of my kid’s mouth. Literally.

I don't think this guy knows what “literally” means. You are only kind of taking food out of his kids mouth if he is incabable of making a living any other way. You are only kind of taking food out of his kids mouth if his actual losses from piracy drive him and his family well below subsistence levels. You are only kind of taking food out of his kids mouth if him and his kid are ineligible for any kind of welfare or social safety benefits. I guess the real question is, is this guy starving his kids?

He isn't entitled to make a living anyway he so chooses. If people aren't willing to pay so that he can continue to create art, then he either has to find something else to do or choose to starve his kid because he feels entitled to make a living the way he chooses.

“A society that is unwilling to pay for art will have to learn to live without it.”

A society that is unwilling to pay for art doesn't need it.

I'm sure this guys a good writer. But just because you write well doesn't mean you think well, or have a clue.

There are arguments to be made that copyright infringement is harmful. But trying to link it with a “culture of entitlement” is an immediate fail as it ignores that people in all cultures of all backgrounds of all socioeconomic strata copy and share culture naturally.